Let’s be honest. When it comes to creating and running a pay per click advertising campaign, the majority of advertisers will focus their efforts on the ‘campaign’ side to it. This generally means people forget about the critical part after the campaign which is where the conversion takes place: the landing page. The truth be told is that yes, the campaign is important to the success of the whole marketing campaign. But, the landing page has got to be equally, if not more, important. For this reason, here are a few reasons why advertisers should start to spend a bit more time on landing page optimization rather than continually tweaking the PPC side to their campaign for small gains.

You can improve a landing page way more than a PPC campaign

This is quite a statement. But, my point with this is that with a PPC campaign, you can only change so much. You have a lot of freedom compared to other forms of online advertising such as banner advertising. But, at the end of the day, you are still limited by what functionality and variables Google and other PPC programs allow you to change.

With a landing page, the sky is the limit. As long as it fits onto a screen, you have infinite amount of options as to how you want your landing page to be. Therefore, to some extent, the level of improvement and optimization you can produce from a landing page far outweighs the level of optimization you can make to a PPC campaign.

The conversion is what makes the money

At the end of the day, it is what happens on every single landing page which ultimately determines how profitable the overall PPC campaign is. This is because unless the ad extensions allow users to ring a number, find a location (or something else which means a conversion does not take place on a landing page), the click that makes the money for advertisers occurs on the landing page. This is why I often refer to PPC campaigns as a domino effect. Every time the web user gets closer to converting for you, one more domino in a long line of dominoes falls over. But, to get the conversion, the last domino has to fall over. Without a good landing page that has been optimized, you may find the ‘last domino’ will struggle to fall over.

Ultimately, the landing page is vital to a PPC campaign because there is more freedom with design and structure. For some, they may look at this as more time needed to make it good. Although this is true, more worryingly is the fact that this also means there are more areas for errors. Therefore, to make sure there are as little or next to no errors in your landing page and that is well optimized is key to a successful PPC campaign.